Kali: The Black Mother of Time

She is the colour of the sky when even the stars have gone out. Naked, four-armed, her hair loose, a girdle of severed human arms at her waist and a garland of severed heads at her throat, a sword in one hand and a freshly cut head dripping in another, her tongue thrust out, she stands on the white prone body of her own husband, who lies beneath her like a corpse. This is Kali, the first of the ten, and for one whole stream of the tradition the root from whom the other nine pour.

Begin where the tradition begins. In the dark.

The name is the teaching

Kali is the feminine of kala, and kala carries two meanings braided together: black, and time. She is the Black One and she is Time, and because time eats everything that exists, she is death. Her consort is Mahakala, Great Time, a name of Shiva; she is Mahakali. To name her is already to be told what she is: the darkness in which all things end, the devouring movement of time itself, personified and standing before you.

The blackness is a fullness of meaning, not an absence of it. Black is the colour into which all colours dissolve, as all forms dissolve into time. Her nakedness, the tradition says, is reality stripped of every veil, beyond the coverings of maya. The sword cuts away the false self; the severed head is the ego she has cut. The garland of heads is most often counted as fifty or fifty-one, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet, the matrikas or mother-sounds, so that she wears the whole of language, the whole of manifestation, as a necklace of cut-off heads.

The blood that would not stop

Her great scriptural appearance is in the Devi Mahatmya, the foundational Goddess-hymn. In its seventh chapter she springs, black and ravenous, from the furrowed brow of the warrior-goddess Ambika to destroy the demon generals Chanda and Munda, and from that deed she takes the name Chamunda. Then comes Raktabija, “Blood-Seed,” the demon whose boon is monstrous: wherever a drop of his blood falls to the earth, a new demon of his full strength springs up. The gods cannot win, because every wound multiplies the enemy. Kali ends it the only way it can be ended. She spreads her tongue across the battlefield and drinks the blood before it can touch the ground, devouring the clones as fast as they are born, until Raktabija stands alone and falls. The image is grotesque and exact: only she who is death can stop a thing that feeds on its own wounding.

Her sound and her two faces

Her seed-syllable, named in the published tradition, is Krim, the classic Kali bija; the full mantras are given by a guru, and this treatise leaves them there. What it can dwell on is the doubleness that the texts hold without strain. There is the battlefield Kali, emaciated, terrible, the Devi Mahatmya’s Chamunda. And there is Dakshina Kali, the form of household and temple worship, hymned in the public-domain Karpuradi Stotra that Arthur Avalon translated a century ago, where the same black, head-garlanded Mother is approached with love rather than horror. Two of her four hands hold the sword and the severed head; the other two are raised in abhaya and varada, the gestures that say do not be afraid and I give. She is, in the same body, the one who destroys and the one who reassures.

Why she stands on Shiva

The most discussed feature of her image is the corpse-white figure beneath her feet. He is Shiva, and the meaning is the Shakta theology of the whole treatise compressed into a posture. Consciousness, the still ground, is inert without power; the Goddess is the power that makes it live. In many images Kali bites her tongue, caught in a gesture the tradition reads as her startled realisation that, in her dance of destruction, she has set her foot upon her own lord. Even her fury is held within a marriage.

The Mother behind the terror

Here the popular Western picture must be corrected, because it is almost always wrong. Outside India, Kali is flattened into a one-note goddess of death, or borrowed as a mascot of transgression. Both sever her from the register that matters most in her living heartland. In Bengal she is, before anything else, Ma, the Mother. At Dakshineswar in the nineteenth century the sage Ramakrishna stood before her fierce image and spoke to it, wept to it, as a child to its mother, and the whole modern devotional flowering around Kali carries that tenderness. The poets of Bengal sang to her as a wayward, beloved daughter and as the only refuge of the helpless. To meet Kali only as terror is to have read her face and missed her eyes.

The truth the tradition guards is that the terror and the tenderness are one thing, not two. The dissolution she is, the ending of all forms in time, is exactly what the bound soul most fears and most needs. To be devoured by Kali is to be freed of everything that was going to be taken anyway. The Mother who frightens is the Mother who liberates.

Where she is worshipped

She is pre-eminent in Bengal and Assam: Dakshineswar and Kalighat in and beside Kolkata, the latter a Shakta pitha, draw vast devotion, and Kali Puja on the new-moon night of the Diwali season is among the great Bengali festivals. Her worship spans the simplest household bhakti and the most demanding Kalikula Tantra, the latter initiatory and guarded. The first of the ten is also, for millions, the most intimately loved.

The treatise has begun in the dark, as the tradition does.

The next face is darkness turned toward rescue: Tara, the star who carries you across.